Why I Am Like I Am

I read lots of stories like this one:


Witnesses: Dog cared for abandoned baby
Monday, May 9, 2005 Posted: 9:02 AM EDT (1302 GMT)
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- A nursing dog foraging for food retrieved an abandoned baby girl in a forest in Kenya and carried the infant to its litter of puppies, witnesses said Monday.

The stray dog carried the infant across a busy road and a barbed wire fence in a poor neighborhood near the Ngong Forests in the capital, Nairobi, Stephen Thoya told the independent Daily Nation newspaper.

The dog apparently found the baby Friday in the plastic bag in which the infant had been abandoned, said Aggrey Mwalimu, owner of the compound where the animal is now living. It was unclear how the baby survived in the bag without suffocating.

Doctors said the baby had been abandoned about two days before the dog discovered her. Medical workers later found maggots in the infant's umbilical cord, a product of days of neglect, Hannah Gakuo, the spokeswoman of the Kenyatta National Hospital, where the girl was taken for treatment, said Monday. No one has yet claimed the baby, she said.

But the 3.3 kilogram (7.28 pounds) infant "is doing well, responding to treatment, she is stable ... she is on antibiotics," Gakuo told The Associated Press. Workers at the hospital are calling the child Angel, she said.

Unwanted infants are often abandoned in Kenya -- sometimes they are even dumped into pit latrines. Poverty and mothers' failed relationships with fathers are often blamed for the problem, and Kenya's weak law enforcement and social security systems means that most people who abandon babies are never caught.

"Abandoned babies are normally taken to the Kenyatta National Hospital because it is a public hospital," Gakuo said. "People are now donating diapers and baby clothes for this one."

Not all abandoned infants are as lucky -- another stray dog ate the cheek of an abandoned infant some three years ago.


I'm not sure how the intricate networking of instantaneous news, such as these types of stories (that would have never been heard of even 10 years ago), shapes my own psyche, my own world view--but I'm sure to be molded by these types of events . . . whether I empathize and mutter a prayer, become an activist and work on legislation, blog the story to a few friends over coffee, hide the evidence and ponder it in my heart, or simply ignore the pain and breeze on to my daily routines . . . But really, I think it's much more complicated than that.